It now seems very likely that many of the 64 triplets, possibly most of them, may code one amino acid or another, and that in general several distinct triplets may code one amino acid.
FRANCIS CRICKIt has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.
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Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
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Exploratory research is really like working in a fog. You don’t know where you’re going. You’re just groping. Then people learn about it afterwards and think how straightforward it was.
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It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
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The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.
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For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the – class as having one too few.
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It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry – which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks – that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.
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The balance of evidence both from the cell-free system and from the study of mutation, suggests that this does not occur at random, and that triplets coding the same amino acid may well be rather similar.
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Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.
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If the code does indeed have some logical foundation then it is legitimate to consider all the evidence, both good and bad, in any attempt to deduce it.
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A busy life is a wasted life.
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It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
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My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure”.
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Chance is the only source of true novelty.
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Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
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When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There’s something that might be called the ‘graduate student syndrome’; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.
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It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.
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A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
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Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.
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Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.
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Evolution is cleverer than you are.
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Again the message to experimentalists is: Be sensible but don’t be impressed too much by negative arguments. If at all possible, try it and see what turns up. Theorists almost always dislike this sort of approach.
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Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.
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We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +’s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +’s.
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Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
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It would appear that the number of nonsense triplets is rather low, since we only occasionally come across them. However this conclusion is less secure than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code.
FRANCIS CRICK